Trend: Mobile Control in Cars

We know you can hook up your MP3 player to your cassette deck using an cassette tape extension and play your music through the car's stereo system.  You may also use an FM tuner with an adapter that a lot of iPod accessory makers offer.  Then there is the direction iPod connectivity offered by car manufacturers.

But let's look beyond that the 58% of cars to be sold in the US will be "iPod ready".  What's more is the 82% of all cars sold  next year will offer Bluetooth connectivity, up from 55% now.  Blorge seems to play up the availability of iPod and iPhone's Bluetooth functionality but it also goes beyond that.

We are coming up fast when mobile devices play a bigger role in our lives.  We already have means which we can use mobile devices to remotely control appliances in our houses so why not cars.  Sony and Saab are also working on just such functionalities.

The ability to control lights in a car may not be as enticing as it sounds but there could conceivably be other uses.  And with Bluetooth connectivity, future functions can be controlled by a mobile device or have statistics of the car be transmitted to the handheld.

The control can be the other way around.  There are already systems that allows the driver to answer and make calls with the car's onboard system.  Perhaps, the car can use the smartphone's always-on Internet connection for a variety of uses.

What other ways do you think connectivity between the car's onboard system and your mobile device can work?

Via Blorge